


Kid Fears

by Milieu



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Monologue, Nonbinary Character, POV First Person, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:40:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25461808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milieu/pseuds/Milieu
Summary: A brief personal statement and interview with Dr. Matthias Rose, Foundation medical examiner and pathologist.
Kudos: 2





	Kid Fears

Hm? Oh, I wasn’t aware that this was going to be recorded.

No, no, I’m fine with that. You have my consent. If you want to record, I’ll just assume that we can’t go on without it. Go ahead.

My name is Dr. Matthias Rose. Coroner. M.D., yes. I know it varies by state, but we require actual knowledge of forensic medicine where I’m from.

Ah – they/them, thank you for asking.

Yes, I’m ready to begin.

Oh, are we starting out with that? Sorry, I had just assumed- no, that’s fine. It’s a bit of a long answer, but if that’s what you want, I’ll go ahead.

Why do I want this job?

My family’s home, the house that I grew up in, had what I will unprofessionally call “bad vibes”.

It wasn’t obvious all, or even most, of the time. If I had been the only person to notice it, I’d probably have written off by now as the products of an overactive imagination, making monsters out of a creaky old house.

Lazarus noticed, though. He was – is – sensitive to things like that. And to other people’s feelings. For a long time, I thought, or I had convinced myself, that he noticed my discomfort at times and decided to humor me so that I would feel better. I’m not so sure now.

We shared a room for as long as we both lived in that house, and over the years he had quite a variety of tricks to take my mind off of- whatever I was frightened of. I was never sure what it was, only that it was there in the dark, and that it was out to get me. That’s the way it is with childhood fears; you know, logically, that there is nothing there waiting for you. You also know that the nothing wants to harm you and would if it could. There’s always a certainty in belief that even scientific fact can’t match for many people.

But I digress. Lazarus, as I’ve said, had a lot of tricks up his sleeve. I think some of the earliest that I can remember were the “ghost traps”; he’d take whatever was at hand and make a circle, or a pentagram or what have you, right in front of the bedroom door. Ghosts and monsters couldn’t get past it, he’d tell me. They would get stuck. They would figure out that they couldn’t reach inside, and they’d leave.

Those ghost traps got more elaborate over time, whenever I stopped being convinced. He started bringing in sticks or rocks from outside to make them instead, because somehow I was convinced that would make them stronger and more effective. I can’t remember if I thought that the ghosts and monsters wouldn’t _really_ give up, or if they would just be replaced with craftier and more determined ones, but I felt that we needed stronger traps.

We graduated to other things once I outgrew the ghost traps – Mom and Dad yelling at us for making a mess right in the doorway with debris from outdoors also helped with that. Lazarus is several years older than me, so it always seemed like he could acquire whatever we needed. He would burn incense around the door and windows for a while to reassure me, until Mom and Dad found out about that too and made him throw it out. He looked up symbols that billed themselves as protective runes and sigils, and he drew them in blacklight ink on the doorframe. Our parents never found out about that one, but I imagine they would have had another fit. Sometimes I wonder if the couple who bought the house when my parents finally moved out ever found the drawings.

Oftentimes, Lazarus would stay up late, talking to me until I could fall asleep. I don’t remember, now, most of what we talked about; the conversations were inconsequential. He would light candles, when he could get away with it. There are probably at least half a dozen other things I could name that he did to soothe me when my imagination ran wild; looking back on it, I was a very superstitious and even paranoid child. I’m not sure I would have been able to put up with myself the way that he did, doing all of that.

But the first thing that he always did, the thing that in hindsight might have made me feel the safest, was to simply lock our bedroom door.

A locked door is the universal first line of defense for your home. We lock doors to protect precious objects, to protect our privacy, to protect ourselves.

Your Foundation, as I understand it right now - it is, at its core, a lot of locked doors manned by personnel who intend to protect the world from whatever waits on the other side.

And yes, I am here out of guilt. When I didn’t understand what Lazarus was doing with his life, when I thought that he had chosen to be some deadbeat conning people out of their money for phony psychic readings or whatever, I blamed myself for putting ideas in his head and setting him on that path. Now that I know more, I suppose that I still blame myself for doing that. And I blame myself for the things I said to him when I didn’t know anything, and for having the gall to be ashamed of the brother who had protected me all throughout my childhood.

But I am also here because I know more now. I know enough to know that Lazarus, wherever he is and whatever he was doing when he and his – team – disappeared, believed wholeheartedly that he was doing good. Maybe he opened one door too many, to abuse a metaphor. Maybe he was trying to hold one shut.

I’m not here to hound anybody for answers. It’s been made clear to me that most people I’ll speak to about this know no more, or even less, than I do. Yes, I am desperately curious, and no, I haven’t come to terms with the idea that I might never know what happened. But that, too, is beside the point.

I’m here, mainly, because I want to do what I can to help.

As superstitious and imaginative as I was as a child, I’ve spent most of my adult life very deliberately not believing in what most people call the supernatural. I’ve seen a lot of monsters in my time, and all of them were human. Working adjacent to law enforcement and the judicial system brings you into contact with these things. There didn’t need to be anything else out there that was worse than what I already knew.

But – to again abuse the metaphor – that door has been opened now, and I can’t just close it and ignore it. I don’t know if this is what Lazarus intended when he wanted me to be informed of his work if anything happened to him, but, well.

I’ve already worked for the state, you know? I doubt your people can be that much shadier or more corrupt. Even if you are an organization that officially doesn’t exist. The pettier someone’s power, the more likely they are to abuse it, in my experience.

I apologize if I’ve rambled. As you might imagine, this is the most unorthodox job interview I’ve ever attended. I hope that I’ve given you a good idea of my intentions and interest, and that I didn’t get too off-topic; most of the people I work with day-to-day are dead and can’t stop me if I go on a tangent.

I would also express my hope that I’ll be hearing from you soon, but I suppose that if I’m not meant to, I won’t know about it long enough to be disappointed.

Thank you for your time. Good afternoon.

**Author's Note:**

> A thing I wrote years ago that I stumbled on again while poking around in some older files. Basically just a short piece featuring an original Foundation character, from before they were actually part of the Foundation. This was never actually submitted to the SCP wiki because as much as I enjoy reading it, the way publishing there is organized isn't really my vibe, so here it is now.
> 
> The idea was that Rose's brother Lazarus was a Foundation operative, who went MIA on official business and is presumed dead because of SCP things. Not much more to it than that.


End file.
